Democrats planning budget blitz to pass Biden agenda

House and Senate Democrats are prepping an audacious and fast-moving game plan to pass President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 rescue package without GOP support, potentially employing tools that would shatter conventional understandings of the budget reconciliation process. Final decisions haven't been made, and publicly top Democratic officials say they still want to try to work with Republicans on a bipartisan plan first. But the emerging strategy calls for House action as early as next week on a "shell" budget resolution for the current fiscal year that would include reconciliation instructions to several House and Senate committees for their pieces of the coronavirus aid package. Reconciliation bills can pass the Senate with a simple majority vote, rather than the typical 60-vote threshold. The goal would be for House and Senate authorizing committees to work jointly on the package and for reconciliation legislation to pass in both chambers before mid-March. That's when a federal $300 weekly unemployment insurance supplement enacted last month as well as extensions of regular benefits lapse. The strategy involves overturning decades of precedent arguing against using reconciliation for discretionary spending, and potentially ignoring the rulings of the Senate parliamentarian on what constitutes allowable reconciliation language, according to sources who weren't authorized to speak publicly. Biden's plan proposes hundreds of billions of dollars for programs that historically have been considered discretionary accounts under appropriators' jurisdiction, including for public health and education. Under Democrats’ thinking, authorizing committees would be allowed to put such funding into a reconciliation bill by designating it as mandatory spending...MORE